War of the Words

Time magazine reports that politicians on both side of the aisle are retiring Global War on Terror (GWOT) from their sound-bite vocabularies because it is so closely connected to the the Bush administration's failing foreign policy and does not accurately reflect what is going on with respect to the war we are actually waging in Iraq. We have to, pardon the expression, redefine the "terror-tory."

A quick walk down memory lane reminds me that wars on or against anything seldom seem to have the intended outcomes that were expected by their slogan-minters. Reagan, Bush, Clinton's War against Drugs and Johnson's War on Poverty did not rid the country or the world of either of those two things. World War I certainly did not prevent World War II. The Six Day War certainly has not prevented subsequent much longer in duration upheavals in the Middle East.

Recently John Edwards at the South Carolina Democratic Debate did not raise his hand when Brian Williams asked "Show of hands question: Do you believe there is such a thing as a global war on terror?"

Edwards is quoted in the Time article as saying "This political language has created a frame that is not accurate and that Bush and his gang have used to justify anything they want to do. It's been used to justify a whole series of things that are not justifiable, ranging from the war in Iraq, to torture, to violation of the civil liberties of Americans, to illegal spying on Americans. Anyone who speaks out against these things is treated as unpatriotic. I also think it suggests that there's a fixed enemy that we can defeat with just a military campaign. I just don't think that's true."

What is true is that there are very bad people in the world doing very bad things for very bad reasons. The problem for our politicians and for us is: we can't say our country isn't part of the problem. When we say we need to put more missiles aka "weapon systems" in Eastern Europe and add new and improved nuclear warheads aka "Reliable Replacement Warheads" to our arsenal, it doesn't sound like the US government is solving the problem of global terror, particularly if you live in a country that might be on the receiving end.

Tracy Chapman said, "why are our missiles called 'peacekeepers' when they aimed to kill?" We need a new vocabulary that does not refer to killing innocent people as "collateral damage" and invading or bombing a sovereign nation as a "pre-emptive strike." Most importantly we should not call our feelings of helplessness and fear -- "supporting the troops." There is a global war of terror, but the terror is largely within each of us.

This is the war we should be fighting and it is the only one that can be won by peaceful means.